MotoGP Review: A look into the future

It's the old story that you only miss things when they've gone, and usually once they've gone, you can't ever get them back no matter how hard you try.

Girlfriends, the nice pair of shoes you left in the hotel room or that favourite place where you used to go on holiday that has now been built on. Never to return, finished, over.

Without banging on like a furniture salesman during a Bank Holiday weekend, the great thing about MotoGP at the moment is not the racing, but the fact that Valentino Rossi is in it.

He is a one in a lifetime phenomenon that I have been lucky enough to commentate about for every one of his races in Grand Prix, going back to a muggy, thunderstorm-affected Sunday afternoon in Malaysia in April 1996.

It was the start of something great.

Valentino Rossi on the grid in Mugello © DPPI

Fast-forwarding to 2008, Rossi said last weekend that he's nigh-on got the pen out to sign with Yamaha for a further two seasons, taking him to the end of 2010 - which is great for fans and great for MotoGP, but what are we going to do after he's gone?

Now I'll be the first to say that no one is indispensable, but we are talking about the most charismatic motorsport people ever. There is going to be a rather large hole when he's gone back to sitting around with his mates by the pool in Ibiza, chilling rather than being bothered with phones calls from corporates wanting him to sign posters in Cologne on the Wednesday of his week off.

My point is that Rossi pretty well saved the show in Barcelona. If it wasn't for him blitzing through from ninth to second, there might not have been much else to entertain people. Less for Andrea Dovizioso or an English bias towards James Toseland ...

Half way through the 25-lapper, ex-racers were brushing off their leathers after we lost three riders in the space of half a lap.

Randy Mamola's Ducati two-seater leathers were still in the back of the garage, while Didier de Radigues was getting twitchy in his RTL Belgium TV commentary booth.

Suzuki's test rider, Nobu Aoki, was on the pit wall learning the pace of the bike before his Monday testing session but he was getting the itch to go back in there too.

Alex De Angelis had tangled with Loris Capirossi and then Randy De Puniet crashed with his clockwork regularity. With Jorge Lorenzo being a sad non-starter after knocking himself out on Friday afternoon we had just 13 points-scorers reach the flag. Taking nothing away from home town hero Dani Pedrosa, who could have won it by 10 seconds, it was not a thriller.

The crowd looked down on last year's numbers, and although the blame was put on striking truckers blockading access routes into the circuit, no one in the press office heard about anyone missing out because of the strikes.

Could it be a worry that even the locals didn't turn up to see Pedrosa race from the front row at his home race? Or did they sense it might have been a bit of a non-event with Rossi deep on the grid (they were wrong) and Lorenzo in hospital (they were right).

The only person who could have taken the fight to Pedrosa was Lorenzo, but he was back in the Dexeus Clinic in Barcelona getting twitchy watching TVE's coverage of the event.

Lorenzo knew he could have been up there with the winner; he's on the same Michelin tyres as the Honda rider and was looking forward to cross swords with arch-rival Pedrosa for the first time on home turf.

Jorge Lorenzo during Friday practice in Barcelona © Back Page Images

Pedrosa doesn't get into hand-to-hand combat, but Lorenzo does. The Yamaha rider uses boxing as an aggressive training method. You can see when he's on the bike that when he flings it into the corners, there is only one way it's going to go. There is no Plan B in case of trouble, and that is what happened to him on Friday morning when he fell.

The whole 'last man standing' thing is right up Jorge's street, not Pedrosa's. Pedrosa likes to race the clock and whip 'em that way. Engineer's heaven, TV disaster.

And what was worrying about the TV show last weekend was that it might have been a glimpse into the future without Rossi or Lorenzo's spark.

Kenny Roberts Senior was right all those years ago. The show is king, rather than the engineering exercise. Somehow, someone has got to grab a relatively tame bull by the horns and sort things out, otherwise the racing might not be as exciting as it used to be with the rip-snorting 990s. They were good years ...

And what if some teams are in such dire straits that they leave, unable to keep up with the leaders? Kawasaki somehow need to get themselves out of the doldrums otherwise they could leave, while Suzuki may well have to supply other teams, if only as a way of getting more data.

And while all this is going on at one end of the grid, you still have to believe that Honda is waiting to get the new pneumatic engine right so it can blitz the others, making it harder for rivals to catch up.

And whatever people say about Honda and its ways, it is actually the Japanese manufacturer who is propping the grid up with six bikes rather than the two of Kawasaki and Suzuki.

In light of this column last week when discussions about the future of 250 were covered, maybe technical discussions about the future of the MotoGP class need to be covered too, before Kenny Roberts says he was right?

But in the meantime, the saving grace is that Rossi looks like he's staying here in MotoGP for a bit longer, so like Agostini, Hailwood or Kenny Roberts himself during his early years, make sure you get a chance to see Rossi before he's gone.